If the text doesn't move you, then just look at the pretty pictures.

Essentially what Whitney Davis is saying here, is that if you REALLY want to know what's beautiful, you have to take into account the moral perceptions of the community.

Here's the link to the full article:

http://www.iqcd.org/Archive/pdf/erotic/Page02/HOMOEROTIC%20ART%20COLLECTION%20FROM%201750%20TO%201920.pdf

"Strictly speaking, in fact, the psychosocial mechanism of the Kantian judgment of beauty should cleave individual expressions of interested desire, such as pederastically motivated appreciation of the youthful male body, from the accumulating palimpsest of a universalizing aesthetic judgment within the community. Many if not most or all interested judgments should turn out to be incompatible with an emergent normative (or disinterested) judgment (even though that universalized judgment must itself be discovered reotrodictively as the maximally dense overlay of accumulating individual judgments considered at some essentially arbitrary threshold of totalization). In an influential but obscure passage on the "Ideal of Beauty", Kant proposes to imagine one's cognitively palimpsested judgments on 'a thousand full-grown men' as he writes, 'in the space where they most come together, and within the contour where the place is illuminated by the greatest concentration of color ... is the stature of a beautiful man.' although conforming to his broader doctrine of the harmonization of faculties, Kant's jump from the mechanically average to the dynamically beautiful -- supposedly a single mind can average its own apprehensions - is not wholly perspicuous. Nor is the transition from the cognitive palimpsest of a single person' judgments of a thousand men to the social palimpsest of 'the intermediate between all singular intuitions of individuals with their manifold variations ' -- say, the average of a thousand different people's judgments of a single man. Finally, the social palimpsest of emergent disinterested judgment (the emergent sensus communis) produces a necessary but not a sufficient condition for beauty - namely, correctness or canonicity. To achieve the true 'idealization' of beauty (le beau ideal - the latter modifies the former term), supposedly the beauty of the emergent but essentially academic 'normal idea' must itself express the highest moral finalities -- strength, benevolence and so forth -- without permitting any 'sensuous charm' to mingle with the great interest, even the delight, we might justifiably take in objects exhibiting or representing such qualities."
(Davis, Whitney. "Homoerotic Art Collections From 1750-1920." page 6)

• ( http link ) Hoby Cup in 3D! Rotate it! Hours of fun!
[Anonymouse]